Researchers found that less than 5 percent of all calls dispatched to police are made quickly enough for officers to stop a crime or arrest a suspect. The average response time to a 9-1-1 call is 10 minutes nationwide. The 911 bottom line: “cases in which 911 technology makes a substantial difference in the outcome of criminal events are extraordinarily rare.”

It’s not just that the police cannot protect you. They don’t even have to come when you call. In most states the government and police owe no legal duty to protect individual citizens from criminal attack. The District of Columbia’s highest court spelled out plainly the “fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.”

The law is similar in most states. A Kansas statute precludes citizens from suing the government or the police for negligently failing to enforce the law or for failing to provide police or fire protection. A California law states that “neither a public entity nor a public employee is liable for failure to establish a police department or otherwise provide police protection service.”[6] As one California appellate court wrote, “police officers have no affirmative statutory duty to do anything.”

The state legislatures and courts protect government entities and police departments from civil liability for failing to provide adequate police protection. Some states invoke the “sovereign immunity” defense, a throwback to the days when the subjects were forbidden to sue the king. Other states have statutes that prevent legal challenges to police “discretionary” functions. Courts preclude lawsuits in those states by holding that answering emergency calls or providing police protection are “discretionary” functions.

Many states evade liability by relying on the ironically named “public duty” doctrine. Like a George Orwell slogan, that doctrine says: police owe a duty to protect the public in general, but not to protect any particular individual.

05/19/2013

Japanese American internment was in "War Relocation Camps" of about 110,000 people of Japanese heritage who lived on the Pacific coast of the United States.

Rex 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984, was a plan by the United States
federal government to test their ability to detain large numbers of
American citizens in case of massive civil unrest or national emergency.

According to the MIAC document, supporters of presidential
candidates Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr. The document asks the Missouri police to be on the lookout for bumper stickers and other paraphernalia associated
with the Constitutional, Campaign for Liberty, and Libertarian parties.

"Vertical" Inequality. Although equality under the law is a bedrock
American principle, the income tax treats citizens unequally. "Vertical"
inequality is created by hugely different tax burdens on citizens at
different income levels. Besides violating the spirit of equal protection guarantees of the
Constitution, such unequal burdens distort perceptions about the costs
and benefits of government because programs appear to be free of cost to
many.

"Horizontal" Inequality. Even people with similar incomes are treated
unequally by the many exemptions, deductions, credits, and other
intricacies of the income tax. For example, there are 59 income tax
provisions that vary depending on marital status. Likewise, the tax
differences between homeowners and renters with the same incomes can be
thousands of dollars because of itemized deductions for property taxes
and mortgage interest.

Complexity, Ambiguity, and Uncertainty. The current IRS
commissioner concedes that the income tax has become too complex for
accurate administration, which is evident in the 28 percent IRS error
rate on phone inquiries and 60 percent error rate on audits. Business
tax rules are so ambiguous that many disputes drag on for years and are
valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Huge Size and Instability of Tax Law. Tax laws, regulations, and related
documentation span 45,662 pages. There were 441 changes to tax rules
in last year's tax-cut law alone. Pension tax laws have been substantially changed nearly every
year since the early 1980s, creating regulatory backlogs and leaving
employers unsure about how to comply.

Denial of Due Process. The IRS engages in many summary judgments, and
enforces them prior to any judicial determinations. Moreover, the very
complexity and ambiguity of the income tax seems to violate due process.
In 1926, the Supreme Court noted that a statute that is "so vague that
men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and
differ as to its application, violates that first essential of due
process of law."

Shifting of the Burden of Proof. For non-criminal tax cases -- the vast
majority of cases -- the tax code reverses the centuries-old common law
principle that the burden of proof rests with the accuser. Except in
some narrow circumstances, the IRS does not have to prove the
correctness of its determinations. When the IRS makes erroneous
assessments, as it often does, citizens carry the burden to prove that
they are wrong.

Unreasonable Searches and Seizures. The
IRS's summons authority under tax code section 7602 allows it to obtain
records of every description from any person without showing probable
cause and without a court order.

Forced Self-Incrimination. The requirement to file tax returns sworn to
under penalty of perjury operates to invalidate the Fifth Amendment
protection against self-incrimination. Citizens face a legal dilemma. On
the one hand, refusing to file a return would expose a citizen to
prosecution for failure to file. On the other hand, disclosing
information sought in tax returns constitutes a waiver of Fifth
Amendment protections. The IRS can and does release that information to
federal, state, and local agencies for both tax and non-tax law
enforcement purposes.

05/09/2013

The Peace Corps is back in Bolivia, from which it was booted out in 1971 due to the widespread belief that it was involved in a project to eradicate the indigenous population through sterilization without consent.

World-famous microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet, the Nobel prize
winner revered as Australia's greatest medical research scientist,
secretly urged the government to develop biological weapons for use
against Indonesia and other "overpopulated" countries of South-East
Asia. (The revelation is contained in top-secret files
declassified by the National Archives of Australia, despite resistance
from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.)

In its 1968 yearly report,
the Rockefeller Foundation acknowledged funding the development of
so-called “anti-fertility vaccines” and their implementation on a
mass-scale. From page 51 onward we read:

“(…) several types of drugs are
known to diminish male fertility, but those that have been tested have
serious problems of toxicity. Very
little work is in progress on immunological methods, such as vaccines,
to reduce fertility, and much more research is required if a solution is
to be found here.”

03/18/2013

Sprawl is a Ponzi scheme and we the taxpayers are the ones left holding the empty bags.

Municipalities chase outward growth to find new tax revenue that
proves insufficient when the infrastructure needs repair; so they chase
even more new growth to pay for the previous round, over and over, until
the pattern chokes the economic life out of the place.

Federal money for highways and regional rail also enter the picture. When you subsidize something, you get more of it, regardless of demand!

02/25/2013

Most people think of it as a physical mark or object placed on/under the skin, but in reality, it is simply an entry in a database. That entry can be turned off, deleted, or modified in ways we don't fully understand yet.

Biocryptology is a mix of biometrics (using physical traits for identification) and cryptology (the study of encoding private information).

It is being beta tested at the School of Mines and Technolgy in South Dakota.

Here is how it works - mechanical engineering major Bernard Keeler handed a Red Bull to a cashier in the Miner's Shack campus shop, typed his birthdate into a pay pad and swiped his finger. Within seconds, the machine had identified his print and checked that blood was pulsing beneath it, allowing him to make the buy. Afterward, Keeler proudly showed off the receipt he was sent via email on his smartphone. This transaction is only possible if Keeler was placed into a database first.

02/20/2013

The targets include “pregnant woman threat,” “older man
with shotgun,” “older man in home with shotgun,” “older woman with gun,”
“young school aged girl,” “young mother on playground,” and “little boy
with real gun.”